When I say cow what do you think of? Bird? Hamburger? Pies? Word associations can tell psychologists a bit about a person. And if you like playing games on the internet, you can help one of those psychologists out by playing a word association game online. Here’s how they describe it:
On average, an adult knows about 40,000 words. Researchers in psychology and linguistics are interested in how these words are represented mentally. In this large-scale study we aim to build a network that captures this knowledge by playing the game of word associations. You can help us with this project by participating in this short and fun study.
The study consists of giving the first three words that come to mind for a list of 14 items.
All ages and nationalities are welcome, but please note that we do require all participants to be fluent English speakers.
They’ll ask you a little bit about yourself, and then it’s on to the fun and games! The same researchers did a similar study on Dutch words. You can explore it here.
If you play, it might wind up going something like this:
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